Part 6

When the young minister had finished, we stood for a moment in silent prayer. You can _not_ stand still in the woods and empty out your own will, without prayer being there instead, quiet, like love.

Then all together, and as if a good many of us had thought of it first, we began to sing:

“There’s a wideness in God’s loving Like the wideness of the sea....”

No sooner had we begun than deep in the wood, clear and sweet above the other singing, there came a voice that we all knew. It was Lavvy--I stood where I could see her coming. She was in a cotton dress, and she had done as she had said--gone into the wood--“where better things are.” And there we had come to find them too. She came down the green aisles, singing; and we were all singing--I wish I might have been where I could hear that singing mount. But I was, and we all were, where we could look into one another’s hearts and read there the common longing to draw near unto God. And the great common God was in our midst.

THE FACE OF FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE

The day that they denominated Threat Hubbelthwait for mayor of Friendship Village was band-concert night. It’s real back-aching work to go to our band concerts, because we ain’t no seats--nothing but a bandstand in the middle of the market square; but yet we all of us do go, because it’s something to do. And you die--you _die_ for some place to go to see folks and to move around among them, elbow near.

I was resting on the bottom step of the bandstand between tunes, when Mis’ Timothy Toplady come by.

“Hold up your head,” says she. “You’re going to be mayored over in a minute by a man that ain’t been drunk for six months. I dunno but they used that in the campaign. This town ain’t got a politic to its name.”

“Do they know yet,” I ask’ her, “who’s going to run against him?”

“I heard ’Lish Warren,” says Mis’ Toplady. “They want Eppleby to run interdependent, but he won’t leave himself down to run against Threat and ’Lish, I don’t believe. I wish’t,” Mis’ Toplady says, “I was men.”

But all of a sudden she sort of straightened up there to the foot of the bandstand.

“No, I don’t,” she says. “I wish’t I was a human being. A human being like the Lord meant me to be, with a finger in His big pie as well as in Timothy Toplady’s everlasting apple-pie. I wish’t--oh, I wish’t I was a real human being, with my brains in my head instead of baked into pies and stitched into clothes and used to clean up floors with.”

I’ve often wished that, too, and every woman had ought to. But Mis’ Toplady had ought to wish it special. She’s big and strong of limb, and she can lift and carry and put through, capable and swift. She’s like a woman left from some time of the world when women was some human-beinger than they are now, and she’s like looking ahead a thousand years.

“But just _half_ a human,” she says now, dreamy, “would know that election day ought to be differn’t from the run o’ days. Some men votes,” she says, “like they used the same muscles for votin’ that they use for bettin’ and buyin’ and sellin’. I wonder if they do.”

When the band started to play, we moved over towards the sidewalk. And there we come on Timothy Toplady and Silas and Mis’ Sykes and Eppleby Holcomb and Mame, and two-three more. We stood there together, listening to the nice, fast tune. They must have been above six-seven hundred folks around the square, all standing quiet in the rings of the arc lights or in the swinging shadows, listening too.

The market square is a wonderful, big open place to have in the middle of a town. It had got set aside years ago to be a park some day, and while it was a-waiting for parkhood, the town used the edge of it for a market and wood-yard. It stretched away ’most to the track and the Pump pasture, and on three sides of it Friendship Village lay--that night with stores shut up and most of the houses shut up while folks took their ease--though it _was_ a back-aching ease--hearing the nice, fast, late tunes.

Right while we was keeping still, up slouched Threat Hubbelthwait, the new mayor nominee.

“Evenin’,” says he, with no reverence for the tune. “Ain’t this here my dance?”

“I heard you was up to lead us one,” says Mis’ Toplady, dry.

Threat took it for congratulations. “Thank you kindly,” says he, easy. “It’s a great trust you folks are talkin’ of placin’ in me.”

“Oh, ’most everybody in town has been trustin’ you for years, ain’t they, Threat?” says Mis’ Toplady, sweet.

That scairt Timothy, her lawful lord, and he talked fast to cover up, but Threat pretended not to hear anyway, and pretty soon he slouched on. And when the piece was over, and the clapping:

“Mercy,” says Mame Holcomb, “the disgrace it’ll be to have that man for mayor! How’d he get himself picked out?”

Silas Sykes explained it. “Threat Hubbelthwait,” says he, “is the only man in this town that can keep the party in at this election. If Threat don’t run, the party’s out.”

“Why not leave the party _go_ out, then?” says Mis’ Toplady, innocent.

“Listen at that!” says Silas. “Leave the party go out! What do we belong to the party for if we’re willing to leave it go out?”

“What,” says Mis’ Toplady, troubled, “do you belong to it for if you’re willing to leave it stay in along with a bad man?”

“We stand by the party to keep the party from being disrupted, woman,” says Silas.

Mis’ Toplady looks at him, puzzled.

“Well,” she says, “I _have_ made an apple-pie to keep the apples from spoiling, but yet that wasn’t the real, true purpose of the pie.”

Eppleby Holcomb kind of chuckled, and just then we all got jostled for a minute with a lot passing us. Lem Toplady come by, his girl on his arm, and a nice, sheepish grin for his mother. Jimmy Sturgis, Jr., and Hugh Merriman and Mis’ Uppers’s boy and two-three more of that crowd, with boys’ eyes in brown faces, and nice, manly ways to their shoulders. Everybody was walking round between tunes. And everywhere, in and out, under foot, went the children, eight, ten, twelve years apiece to ’em, and couldn’t be left home because they wasn’t anybody to leave ’em with. And there they was, waiting to be Friendship Village when the rest of us should get out of the market square for good; and there was Friendship Village, over beyond the arc light, waiting to be their town.

“Eppleby,” I says, “why don’t you run against Threat, and mayor this town like it ought to be?”

“Because,” Silas spoke up for him, “Eppleby belongs to the party.”

“You _do_?” says I to Eppleby. “Well, if Threat, that would like to see the world run backwards, and you, that’s a-pushing some on the west side like the Lord meant--if you two belongs to the same party, I bet the party’s about ready to come in two pieces anyhow. Why don’t you leave it go, and get denominated on your own hook, Eppleby?” I ask’ him.

“I’m going to if ’Lish gets put up,” he says low, to me. But out loud he says, careless: “I couldn’t beat the saloon folks. They’re solid for Threat.”

“But ain’t we more folks to this town than them?” Mame asks.

“Yes,” says Eppleby, “but they don’t vote. Half the best men won’t touch the city hall with a clothes prop. The business men can’t vote much--they’ve got too mixed a trade, both sides eatin’ groceries and wearin’ clothes. And election time comes when them out towards the city limits is doing Spring plowin’ and won’t bother to come in town. (We’d took in most of the surrounding country in our efforts to beat out Red Barns in population.) And the _Evening Daily_ was give to understand six months ago that the brewery ad. would come out if Threat wa’n’t their ticket. Anybody that runs against him is beat before the polls open.”

“Among ’em all, what about the town?” says I.

Mis’ Sykes spoke up, majestic. “The town,” says she, “is as good as any town. I’m sure we’ve got as many nice residences and well-kep’ yards, and as many modern improvements as most towns our size. _My_ part, I’m too patriotic to be all the time askin’ for more.”

“I wonder, Mis’ Sykes,” I couldn’t help saying, “you ain’t too religious ever to pray about yourself.”

The band always plays “America” to go home on, not so much out of patriotism, I guess, as to let folks know it’s time to go home. And just as they was tuning up, Mis’ Toplady leaned over to me, brooding.

“I wouldn’t care so much,” she says, “if it wasn’t Lem’s first vote. Lem was twenty-one in the spring, and it’s his first vote. I just can’t bear to think of his voting for Threat or ’Lish, to cut his voting teeth on.”

“I know,” I says. “So it is Hugh Merriman’s first vote--and Mis’ Uppers’s boy and Jimmy Sturgis’s, Jr. Don’t it seem too bad?”

Mis’ Toplady looked at the men. “Couldn’t you do something to your election day that you own so personal?” she snaps. “Couldn’t you make it a day that is a day? A day that would make folks want to vote decent, and be some kitterin’-minded about votin’ bad?”

“Like what?” says Timothy, blank.

“Oh--I dunno,” says Mis’ Toplady, restless. “Somethin’ that’ll roust folks up and give ’em to see their town like a wagon to be pulled and not one to be rode in. Exercises, mebbe----”

“_Exercises!_” says Silas Sykes, explosive. “You’ll be wantin’ the stores closed election day, next thing.”

“I mean that now,” says Mis’ Toplady. “Exercises,” she went on, “that’ll show ’em what’s being done for ’em in the world--and the universe--and I dunno but other places. Exercises that’ll make ’em think ahead and out, and up and in the air instead of just down into their pocketbooks. I dunno. Exercises that’ll make ’em see the state like a state, _their_ state----”

“My dum, woman,” says Silas, “election day ain’t no Fourth of July proceedings.”

“Ain’t it?” says Mis’ Toplady. “That’s what I dunno. It kind of seems to me as if it was.”

Then the band jabbed into “America” abundant, and the men took off their hats, patriotic as pictures. And I stood there, kind of looking at us all while we listened. I see all them hundreds of us out of the stores and houses of Friendship Village that was laying over behind us there in the dark, waiting for us to keep on a-making it; and I see Lem Toplady and the rest of ’em going to do their first move public towards the making. And while the band was playing and everybody humming their country’s air, negligent in their throats, I started to slip off--I couldn’t help it--and to go home by the back street, like I didn’t want to meet the village face to face.

But I hadn’t got very far when the band done a thing it’s been doing lately--ever since the new leader come that’s some kind of a foreigner up to the round-house. It run off into some kind of a French piece with a wonderful tang to it. The children have been singing it in school, with some different words to it, and when the band begun it now, they all kind of hummed it, all over the square. The Marseilles, I think they call it--like a kind of cloth. When I hear it, it always makes me want to go and start something. It done that now. And I says to myself:

“What you slinkin’ off home for, actin’ like the ‘best’ people that can’t look their town in the face at election time? Go on down Daphne Street like a citizen, that you are one.”

And I did, and walked along the little watching streets with all the rest of us, and that march music in my heels. And listening to it, and seeing us all streaming to our homes, I could ’most have felt like we was real folks living in a real town, like towns was meant to be.

But I lost the feeling two days after, when ’Lish got the other denomination, and begun swaggering around similar to Threat, peddling promises. When ’Lish done that, though, Eppleby done like he said and come out to run interdependent; only he done it real halfhearted, and them that signed his petition was mostly out of business or retired or working for the Government or ministers or like that, and everybody thought they was about the only ones that would be to the polls for him. Because the rest was already engaged in uttering the same old fear that voting for Eppleby now would be throwing their vote away. And they allowed that Threat was a little better than ’Lish, or that ’Lish was a little nobler than Threat, and they laid to vote according.

“If only the town could get rousted up somehow,” Mis’ Toplady kep’ saying, grieving. “It seems as if, if there was something to roust folks, they’d do something. And if they’d only do something, they’d get rousted. It’s like a snake with its tail in its mouth. It seems as if, if we could have some doin’s on election day--oh, I wish’t we was a real human being,” she says, again and again, “I wish’t we was. I bet we’d wind this town up, and we wouldn’t set it by Threat’s watch nor by ’Lish’s, either. We’d set it by the sun.”

But we see we couldn’t take no part. And the town settled down on its oars restful, waiting for election day that looked like it wasn’t going to do nothing but shake up the town feather-bed and lay it back on springs that sagged in the same old place.

* * * * *

Three days before election it happened I was up early to mix my bread. The clock showed half-past six just as I got through with my breakfast, and the sun come in so nice and slanting acrost my kitchen floor that I stepped to the open door to get the smell of it. All outside lay sweet and surprised, like the first notes of something being played. Before I knew it, I went out and down the path, between the things that hadn’t come up yet--ain’t it like all outdoors was friendly and elbow near, the way it keeps pulling at you to be out there with it? Before I knew it I was out my back gate and acrost the vacant lot and off down the old trail road, my hands wrapped up in my apron and me being just selfish glad I was alive.

With outdoors all around you, just waiting to be paid attention to; with friends set here and there in the world, near like planets, high and single like stars, or grouped like constellations; and with a spirit inside us--the same spirit--trying to say something--and trying to say the same thing--ain’t life rich? Ain’t it rich?

Sometimes I try to think what could make it richer. And I can never get any farther than the growing of those three foundation things: Outdoors and friends and the spirit. For life will be richer when the outdoors gets done--the floods tamed, the roads built, the forests tended, the deserts risen from the dead and the cities and towns and villages tamed and built and trained and tended and risen from the dead of dirt and ugliness to be real bodies for the souls stirring and beating in them now--and trying to speak. And life will be richer when friends come true--not just this planet, and that star, and these constellations,--but when the whole great company of friends, in homes, in churches, in mines, in prisons, in factories, in brothels, shall be known to us, and set free to be real bodies for the souls stirring and beating in them now--and trying to speak. And not till then will that spirit in outdoors and in cities and in us--the same spirit, trying to say the same thing--not till then can that spirit ever get it said.

“Oh,” I thought, “on a morning like this, if somebody could only think of the right word, maybe the whole thing might come true.”

And almost I knew what that word was--like you do.

I remember I wasn’t thinking of anything but wonder, when away acrost the Pump pasture I see a thing. It wasn’t a tent or it wasn’t a wagon or it wasn’t a farm machine of any kind. I looked at it a minute and I couldn’t formulate nothing. And as you could drive through the Pump pasture fence ’most anywheres, I went through and started right over to whatever was there.

’Most anybody can tell you how it looked, for by nine o’clock the whole village was out to it. But I’ll never be able to tell much about the feel of the minute when I see the two great silk wings and the airy wire, and knew I was coming close up to a flying-machine, setting there on the ground, like a god that had stopped on a knoll to tie his shoe.

A man was down on his hands and knees, doing something to an underneath part of it, but I guess at first I hardly see him. The machine was the thing, the machine that could go up in the air, the machine that _had done it at last_!

“Good morning,” says the man, all of a sudden. “Am I trespassing?”

He stood there with his cap in his hand, clean-muscled, youngish, easy-acting, and as casual as if he’d just come out of a doorway instead of out of the sky.

I says, “Ain’t it wonderful? Ain’t it wonderful?” Which is just exactly what I’d said about Mis’ Toplady’s crocheted bed-spread. It’s terrible to try to talk with nothing but the dictionary back of you.

“Yes,” he says, “it is. Then I’m not trespassing?”

“No more’n the eagles of the Lord,” I says to him. “Are you broke down?”

“There’s a little something wrong with the balance,” he says. “I’m going to lie over here a day or so, providing the eagle of the Lord figure holds for the town. What place will this be?” he asks.

“Friendship Village,” I says.

“Friendship Village,” he says it after me, and looked off at it. And I stood for a minute looking at it, too.

Beyond the trees north of the pasture it lay, with little lifts of smoke curling up from folks’s cook-stoves. There was a look to it of breakfasts a-getting and stores being opened and the day rousting up. Right while we looked, the big, bass seven o’clock whistle blew over to the round-house, and the little peepy one chimed in up at the brick-yard, and I could hear the town clock in the engine-house striking, kind of old-fashioned and sweet-toned. And all around the country lay quiet-seeming, down to the flats and out acrost the tracks and clear to the city limits that we couldn’t see, where the life of the little fields was going on. And in that nice, cozy, seven-o’clock minute I see it all as I do sometimes, almost like a person sitting there, with its face turned towards me, expectant, waiting to see what I’m going to do for it.

“Jove,” says the man, “look at it! Look at it. It looks like the family sitting down to breakfast.”

I glanced up at him quick. Not many sees villages that way. The most sees them like cats asleep in the sun. But I always like to think of ’em like a room--a little room in the house, full of its family, real busy getting the room-work done up in time.

“From here,” I says, “it does most look like a real town.”

“More folks live in the little towns of the United States than in the big cities of it,” he said, absent.

“They _do_?” I says.

“By count,” he answers, nodding, and stood a minute looking over at the roofs and the water tower. “You feel that,” he says, “when you see them the way I do. From up high. I keep seeing them skimming under me, little places whose names don’t show. And it always seems that way--like the family at breakfast--or working--or sitting around the arc lamp. You’re splendid--you little towns. What you do is what the world does.”

A kind of shiver took me in the back of my head.

“It looks as if such nice things were going on over there--in Friendship Village,” he says, his voice sort of wrapping about the name.

“Election day is going on,” I says, “day after to-morrow. But it won’t be so very nice.”

“No,” he says, “they aren’t very nice--yet.”

That made me think of something. “Have you been in many cities and dropped down into many towns?” I ask’ him.

“Several,” says he,--sort of rueful.

“On election day?” I says.

“Sometimes,” he answered.

“Well, then,” I says, “maybe you can tell me what they do on election day in cities. Don’t they ever have exercises?”

“Exercises?” he says over, blank.

“Why, yes,” I says, “though I dunno just how I mean that. But don’t they ever open up the city hall and have singing and speeches--not political speeches, but ones about folks and about living? I should think they must do that somewheres--‘most anybody would of thought of that. And have the young folks there, and have them that’s going to vote sort of--well, _commenced_, like college. Don’t they do that, places?”

When he shook his head I was worried for fear he’d think I was crazy.

“No,” he says, “I never heard of their doing that anywhere--yet.”

But when he says that “yet” I wasn’t worried any more. And I burst right out and told him about our trouble in Friendship Village, and about the “best” people never voting, and the city limits folks not coming in for it, and about our two candidates, and about Eppleby, that hadn’t a ghost of a show.

“Us ladies,” I wound up, “wanted to have a kind of an all-together campaign--with mass meetings of folks to kind of talk over the town, mutual. And we wanted to get up some exercises to make election day a real true day, and to roust folks up to being not so very far from the way things was meant to be. But the men folks said it wasn’t never done so. They give us that reason.”

The bird-man looked at me, and nodded. “I fancy it isn’t,” he says, “--yet.”

But he didn’t say anything else, and I thought he thought I was woman-foolish; so to cover up, I says, hasty:

“_Could_ you leave me hear you talk a little about it? I mean about flying. It’s old to you, but it’s after-I-die to me. I never shall do it. So far I’ve never seen it. But oh, I like to hear about it. It seems the freest-feeling thing we’ve ever done.”

“To do,” he says, “it’s coldish. And it’s largely acrobatics--yet. But to see--yes, I fancy it is about the freest-feeling thing we’ve ever done. A thing,” he says my words over, smiling a little, “that makes you think you’re a step nearer to the way things were meant to be.” Then he stood still a minute, looking down at me meditative. “Has there ever been a flying-machine in Friendship Village?” he ask’ me.

“Never,” I says--and my heart stood still at what it thought of.

“And day after to-morrow is your election day?” he says over.

“Yes,” I says--and my head begun to beat like my heart wasn’t.

“The machine will be in shape by then,” he said. “Would--would you care to have me make a flight on election-day morning? Free, you know. It wouldn’t be much; but it might,” he says, with his little smile, “it might pull in a few votes from the edge of town.”

“Oh, my land--oh, my land a-living!” I says--and couldn’t say another word.

But I knew he knew what I meant. It was a dream like I hadn’t ever dreamed of dreaming. It seems it was his own machine--he was on his own hook, a-pleasuring. And it seemed as if he just had come like an eagle of the Lord, same as I said.

We settled where I was to let him know, and then I headed for Mis’ Toplady’s, walking some on the ground and some in the air. For I sensed the thing, whole and clear, so be we could get enough to pitch in. And Mis’ Toplady left her breakfast dishes setting, like I had mine, and away we went. And I see Mis’ Toplady’s ideas was occupying her whole face.

We went straight to the mothers--Mis’ Uppers and Mis’ Merriman and Mis’ Sturgis and the others that had sons that was going to vote, this year or in ten years or in twenty years. I dunno whether it was the mother in them, or just the straight human being in them--but they see, the most of ’em, what it was we meant. Of course some of them just see the lark, and some of them just didn’t want to refuse us, and some of them just joined in because they’re the joining-in kind. But oh, some of them see what we see--and it was something shining and real and far off, and it made us willing to go ahead like wild, and I dunno but like mad. Ain’t it wonderful how when a plan is born into the world, it grows on air? On air--and a little pitching in to work?

All but Mis’ Silas Sykes. When we went to see her, Mis’ Sykes was like that much adamant.